The 2012 Lozano Long Conference: A LLILAS-CMAS Collaboration . Central Americans and the Latino/a Landscape: New Configurations of Latina/o America
February 22.25, 2012
Co-organized by the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, this conference initiates a dialogue about the locations and experiences framing the practices of the wide spectrum of Latino/a communities.
Focusing on U.S. Central American populations whose role has been critical in the reconfiguration of Latino/a Studies in the first decade of the twenty-firstcentury, this scholarly conversation and cultural interchange is of paramount importance, considering the continuous growth, visibility, and significance of Central Americans in the U.S. and Latino/a landscape. The purpose of this conference is to suggest that Latina/o America needs to be understood as a geographically displaced phenomenon with complex connections of commodities, people, and cultural production.
Latina/o America has gained prominence in the United States through the demographic changes charted by the 2010 U.S. Census and the contentious, ongoing political debates over migration, undocumented and otherwise. The demographic projections of an increasingly U.S. Latino population have beencomplemented by an unprecedented militarization of the border and criminalization of the migrants who successfully cross it. Heavily militarized workplace raids by the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agency (ICE), such as the one in 2008 at the Agriprocessors. kosher meat processing plant that detained 389 undocumented workers, confirm that such state actions reveal, among other things, the changing nature of Latinidad in the United States. In that raid, most of those detained were of Guatemalan Maya origin, a fact that suggests yet another layer of complexity to the migratory flows that now comprise Latina/o America.
While theoretically committed to analyzing the necessarily transnational dimensions of U.S. Latina/o communities, Latina/o Studies in practice has typically focused upon the experiences of three specific Latina/o subpopulations in their quest for social, economic, and political power once in the United States by either conquest or migration, or some combination of the two. The contestation of power.often racialized in its operation by the state and civil society.by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans has been the primary focus of Latino/a Studies for the past forty years. While valuable for its insights into these key experiences, Latino/a Studies has sometimes fetishized land loss (in the case of Mexican Americans), the loss of an authentic .Island. (Puerto Rico), or political exile (Cuban Americans) as the defining characteristics, and therefore problematics, of Latino/a Studies. How Latino/a communities, and therefore Latino/a Studies, might be transformed by new migrations has been seriously overlooked.
This traditional vision is being transformed by the arrival of Central Americans in the U.S. Migration from Central America has had an impact on their countries and region of origin since the original mass departure to the United States as a consequence of the civil wars of the 1980s and the implementation of neoliberalist economic policies during the 1990s. The case of Central Americans might be considered paradigmatic in this regard. The massive flow of Central American immigrants to the United States was a direct result of thebrutality of civil wars, particularly the toll they extracted from peasant communities. As armies advanced destroying village after village and massacring its occupants, thousands of refugees, primarily from El Salvador and Guatemala, fled to Mexico seeking safety. Some remained there in UN-sponsored refugee camps, but many more continued to the United States and Canada. Anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans also fled from their country, settling primarily in Florida.
Ostensibly, peace was signed in El Salvador in 1992 and in Guatemala in 1996. This implied, in principle, a process of social reconciliation, reconstruction, and development. Nevertheless, the peace dividend never took place. The arrival of peace did end military combat, as guerrillas turned their weapons in andformed legal political parties. But the much-promised international aid never arrived in sufficient quantity as neoliberalism gained influence in a hemispheric re-visioning of the role of the state. What was expected to be a massive Marshall-like plan to fully modernize these nations to uproot a model of underdevelopment became only a trickle that dwindled to almost nothing after 2000. The most delinquent country in terms of economic aid was the United States. Despite President Clinton.s apologies to the populations of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua in 1997, the U.S. Congress approved only negligible aid to them in the postwar period. As a result, the actual effect of postwar neoliberalism was one of little economic growth, massive unemployment (officially recorded at 50% in Guatemala and El Salvador, but most likely higher in both), and the gradual emergence of a non-regulated parallel power to the state produced by criminal gangs. These gangs gained muscle, wealth, and prestige as unemployed youngsters and immigrants deported from the United States joined their ranks. These last two factors were direct consequences of the United States. reneging on most promises made prior to the signing of the peace treaties after the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and most markedly after 9/11 when Central America became thoroughly invisible in U.S. foreign policy, while the immigration escape valve began to close.
As the example of Central American migration to the United States suggests, the massive inflow from areas hitherto seldom considered as sources of Latina/ocommunities, along with continued migration from Mexico, has remade the very notion of Latinidad. The influx of undocumented Central Americans and Mexican nationals challenges older frameworks of cultural conflict modeled upon thespecific historical experiences of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans, often (but not always) regularized in their legal status in the United States. The goal of this conference is to explore the ways both Latina/o Studies and Latin American Studies must change fundamental assumptions about each field.s object of study in order to more accurately and fully understand the transformations taking place across the Americas.
The invited speakers will anchor the various thematic areas around which the conference panels will be organized, which include but are not limited to:
(1) Growth, visibility, and significance of Central Americans in the U.S. and Latina/o landscape; (2) complex connections of Latina/o commodities, people, and cultural production; (3) theoretical transformations of Latina/o Studies; (4) transforming nature of migration flows to the U.S.; and (5) .Central Americanization. of Mexico as a result of becoming an immigration corridor for non-Mexicans and of the war against drug cartels and its ensuing violence.